


the intersection in the middle of the universe

by redluxite (wordstruck)



Series: VLD One-Shots [32]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Falling In Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Parallel Universes, moderate angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-22 10:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22714951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstruck/pseuds/redluxite
Summary: Here is something interesting about the universe: that it is not the only one. There are infinite realities existing parallel to each other, overlapping, sitting tangent, sitting separate entirely. They spin on and on and sometimes, sometimes, they touch.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: VLD One-Shots [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/876162
Comments: 14
Kudos: 50





	the intersection in the middle of the universe

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a [**Sheith AU thread**](https://twitter.com/redluxite/status/1146060143592759297) way back when on Twitter, that was inspired by an older OtaYuri thread where they lived in parallel universes that touched. I wrote the OtaYuri one for the YOI Lit Mag back in... 2017, maybe? So now I'm revising it for Sheith ^__^
> 
> The premise is this:  
>  _Shiro and Keith exist in the same time and place, but in different universes. Shiro’s apartment complex is in the same physical location as Keith’s university, in a place where their worlds intersect just a little, and sometimes things cross over. There is no color in Keith’s world but it starts to stain his vision; there is no music in Shiro’s world but he starts to hear Keith’s violin._
> 
> _And amid all this, perhaps it’s possible to fall in love with someone not in your reality._
> 
> The concept is partly inspired by Cloud Atlas (in particular the scene of Luisa Rey hearing the sextet in a music store). I've loved the concept of concurrent, parallel, intersecting worlds for a long time now, and it's an intriguing premise for fic XD I added in the lack of music in Shiro's world and the lack of color in Keith's for the fic (it's not in the original thread), which I hope doesn't come off as unwieldy.
> 
> I went over it to edit a few times, but I'll fix anything else in retrospect. I hope you like the fic!!

* * *

It begins with music.

The first thing Shiro does when he enters his tiny apartment is drop his bag to the floor and sink down beside it. His arm aches, as it always does when he’s anxious, when the splinters and ice climb from his lungs to his throat and make him feel like suffocating.

It shouldn’t bother him, it shouldn’t. It’s a _good_ thing, his inclusion in the upcoming exhibit; it’s a testament to his recovery and how far he’s come since the first time holding a pencil with shaking fingers. Never mind the whispers that say _favoritism_ and _bias,_ never mind the doubt that creeps under his skin. Never mind the scattering of half-finished sketches around the space that functions as his bedroom and studio, the blank easel that sits on its stand and mocks him whenever he wakes up.

Shiro lets his head fall back against the woodwork with a _thunk_ and sighs. Never mind that he doesn’t feel he deserves it.

He has time. He’ll figure something out.

When his breathing has slowed to something closer to normal, Shiro pushes up off the floor and deposits his bag on the couch. He needs to change, put away his things, think about dinner.

He’s rummaging through the contents of his fridge when he hears it — a sound just at the edge of hearing. It isn’t much, isn’t loud; just a faint sound, sweet and lilting. Shiro pauses for a moment, frowning, because he’s never heard anything like it before and it — resonates, somehow. Shakes something in his bones.

He’s not sure what to make of it, though, caught off-guard as he is by something he doesn’t know. In the end, he shakes his head, and turns back to his fridge.

Absently, idly, he finds himself starting to hum as he waits for the pasta to heat up in his microwave.

It’s out of his mind by the time he gets ready for sleep.

The next morning, Shiro goes for his usual run, prying himself from his sheets at just past seven even if his brain protests being woken up. As he jogs down familiar streets, headed for the nearby park, he floats some concepts around in his head for the exhibit. He has some sketches back at the apartment he can use — the beachfront community at Pieira, the view from the roof of his apartment building — but nothing that feels _right,_ that sticks.

He hears it again just as he pauses to catch his breath — that short, soft sequence of sound, somewhere in the periphery of his sense. Like it’s here but not quite here. Shiro looks around, frowning; there’s no one else around him, and he has no idea what it even _is._

The sound fades away. Shiro shakes his head and resumes his run, picking up his pace slightly. It could have come from anywhere around him, really; it’s not important.

When he reaches the end of his route, he’s shrugged it off, wondering what to get for breakfast.

It doesn’t leave him, though. Shiro hears it again the next day and the next, each time a little more solid, somehow. More substantial. More real.

He would wonder if he were going mad, or relapsing, but something about the sound feels — familiar. Like he’s known it all his life. The tones are always just at the edge of his hearing, just at the edge of memory; like a word he can’t remember, there at the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t even _have_ a word for what he’s hearing, just that it’s there and haunting him.

He would wonder, but something about the sound feels reassuring. Like it’s important. Like it’s meant for him.

.o0o.

The first thing Keith does when he gets to his dorm is place his violin case carefully onto his desk, while his bag falls to the floor. The next thing he does is collapse into his tiny bed, face down, muffling the world around him a little. It’s been a long and difficult day, no matter that he’d tried to make the best of it. It isn’t the first bad day he’s had, and it won’t be the last, but nothing about that makes him feel better. So he lets himself brood for a while, balling his hands into fists and scrunching his sheets and resisting the urge to scream into the mattress.

Then he sighs and rolls over, and flops down onto his back.

It stings more than he’d thought, the rejection from the student showcase. When he’d gone to the audition he’d told himself he wouldn’t feel disappointed if he didn’t make it; as a freshman, as an unestablished talent, it’s not surprising he hasn’t been included. And yet when he’d read the acceptance list and his name hadn’t been on it—

Sitting up, Keith kicks his shoes off angrily and exhales, a sharp burst of air. Taking a scholarship all the way at Marmora U was supposed to be better — give him more opportunities, resources, room to explore. But sometimes he feels like packing up and going back, demanding Thace just give him a job.

Keith drags a hand over his face and heaves another sigh.

So much for being done brooding.

While he contemplates what to have for dinner — cafeteria food, or cheap delivery — Keith gets up and changes, trading jeans for loose yoga pants and a button-down for an oversized hoodie. He lets himself get lost in the motions of a well-established evening routine: putting away his things, setting any homework out on his desk, checking over his violin. He ends up getting curry and rice delivered from the Indian restaurant that he and Lotor like.

When he’s done, he picks up his violin.

It’s easily the most expensive thing in his tiny room, secondhand and well-worn as it is. There’s a few scratches on the body, a little nick in the wood, but it’s _his_ and that’s all that matters. The Luxite violin is all he has left of his mother, and he guards it as closely as any secret kept in his chest.

Keith runs his fingers over the strings in a light touch.

There’s a melody that keeps escaping him. He’s been trying to compose something original, a piece that’s all his own, but he can’t seem to get it right. He has a few sequences already mapped out, some refrains he wants to include. But he isn’t sure yet how to weave it all together into something coherent.

He runs through some snippets, a series of soft up-and-down lilts that quiet him a bit. He doesn’t need to worry about disturbing; in a school for the performing arts, it’s nothing new to hear people practicing in their rooms until curfew. Little by little he settles, until his breathing has slowed to the time of the music.

When the crackle in his chest has finally eased, he goes to bed.

Keith dreams that night, of light hair and an easy smile. There is so much — something, bright and vivid, smeared across walls and canvases and strong fingers. There’s an echo of sharp pain up his right arm that resonates every time he moves it.

The vivid streaks linger in his vision when he wakes up in the morning, but by the time he’s wrestled for a stall in the dorm shower, they’ve slipped from his mind.

It was just a dream, after all.

He goes to school, goes through his classes. He re-does a practical from yesterday and performs better this time; Professor Honerva smiles at him as he leaves. Keith walks past the announcements board and doesn’t look at the roster of performers for the showcase in three months.

He spends his lunch break sitting on a first-floor ledge overlooking the quad, idly notating part of a melody while he eats. Lotor comes to join him after a while, wisely not mentioning that he’s one of the centerpieces of the recital.

The sudden influx of students lets both of them know that the break is almost over. Sliding into easy banter, the two of them pack up their stuff and start walking. As the crowd shunts them along, Keith’s mind wanders to the reviewer for music history that he still has to read, and his paper for an elective, and—

There’s a burst of something bright and warm in his peripheral vision. Keith stops, glancing around, startled. A few students jostle past him, grumbling about him blocking the way. But it’s not on any of them, not their hair or their clothes or anything.

He blinks, trying to dislodge the sensation of having been knocked sidewise for a moment. A few feet ahead, Lotor turns, asking if something’s wrong. Keith shakes his head and smiles faintly, resumes walking.

He returns to his dorm that evening, and most evenings after that, tired and on edge. He stands in the middle of his room and taps fingers on strings and tries to piece together the sequences of notes, but nothing coalesce. He falls back on his bed in frustration.

He keeps dreaming.

.o0o.

Here is something interesting about the universe: that it is not the only one. There are infinite realities existing parallel to each other, overlapping, sitting tangent, sitting separate entirely. They spin on and on and sometimes, sometimes, they touch.

Here: a small studio filled with color, in a world without music. A boy fourteen months removed from an accident and a terror that he might not be able to paint again.

Here: an old violin filled with sound, in a world without color. A boy with nothing to his name but his instrument and his ambitions, searching for his own music.

Here they intersect, just a little, just enough.

Here they make a story.

.o0o.

Shiro sits in his room and stares at discarded ideas, half-finished sketches; at the easel that remains frustratingly blank. He fiddles with a piece of graphite until his fingers are smudged grey, leaving fingerprints on whatever he touches. That sound, the whatever-it-is — it lingers at the back of his mind, tugging at something inside of him. Little snippets of something, always just slightly familiar, always feeling long-loved but forgotten.

He goes to sleep that night and dreams of a boy with eyes like a galaxy, cradling a wooden object to his shoulder. He wakes up and for the first time in so long, feels an overwhelming urge to draw that sits like static under his skin. He fumbles for pencil and paper and starts to sketch, to try and pin it down, somehow, the intensity of that gaze and the sweet-bow of his lips.

Keith’s dreams become brighter and brighter, the smears and streaks everywhere now. Everything he sees has a peculiar quality to it he’s never seen before, can’t describe. There’s someone at the center of it all, with broad shoulders and a boyish grin, sitting in front of a blank square propped on a wooden stand. He’s the only thing in Keith’s dreams without that warmth to him. Keith looks at him and thinks of flashes of pain, but also of laughter.

He wakes up wanting to translate all that somehow into music, make the feeling in his dreams heard. He tries to write down notes, bars, but it always escapes him. He grits his teeth in frustration as he scratches out sequences from sheet music, crumples papers to toss to the floor. There is a melody he’s searching for, but he can’t find it.

.o0o.

So it goes: Shiro pushes himself, throwing out sketch after sketch because nothing seems quite _right._ He goes to class and finds himself humming under his breath, doodling things in the margins of his notebooks. Everything he creates fees lacklustre somehow, like something is missing. His professors tell him he’s being too much of a perfectionist and he resists the urge to snipe back in their faces.

He chucks his failed portraits and studies in the trash, thinks about tearing them up.

He still hears the soft sounds, sometimes, and they feel like the only good thing in his life.

Shiro’s smudging part of his sketch in his living room one afternoon when he finds himself humming and realizes what he’s hearing is called _music._ He feels that newfound awareness settle in his mind, and feels a little warmer for it.

Keith does poorly in his music theory exam, does all right in his next practical. He tries not to feel resentful of their classmates, tries not to envy their skills and their achievements, but it gnaws at his bones all the same. He knows it’s not his fault that all he’d had for most of his childhood was an old violin and no one to teach him; knows that late starts and less resources are not insurmountable obstacles. But these days it feels like no matter how much he practices, works and works and _tries,_ it’s not enough.

The melody in his head continues to evade him, always at the edge of thought but never where he can reach out and take it, set it down. He tosses his violin bow aside in exasperation as another potential sequence tapers off into nothing.

He drops down into a chair, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to quiet his breathing. It does nothing to lessen the hollow feeling in his chest.

Keith sleeps restlessly that night, dreaming again of pain and frustration. He wakes up with the realization that what he’s been seeing is called _color._ It smudges the world around him more and more now, on fruits and flowers and the jacket hanging on his closet door.

He touches his violin, which is colored something warm and comforting. He wonders if the boy he’s been dreaming about sees things like this all the time.

If he does — his world must be beautiful.

Shiro sits up in bed one morning with a name on his lips.

“Keith,” he murmurs, soft, into the hazy grey of after-dawn. He touches fingers to his mouth, furrows his brow. The name feels — significant.

Then he looks at the half-finished drawing in his open sketchbook and thinks, _oh._

_Oh,_

_it’s you._

(In Keith’s world, he pauses mid-melody, feeling something tug faintly in his chest. There is recognition there, an echo. He blinks in surprise, lips lightly parted.

He stands still a moment longer in the practice room, then restarts the piece.)

The other boy’s name comes to Keith one night, far too late, as he absently runs fingers over the strings of his violin and hums the same melody that’s been stuck in his head for weeks. He looks up and thinks, suddenly, _Shiro._

(In his world, Shiro’s hands pause over paper.

Oddly enough, he feels like he’s just been kissed.)

.o0o.

The dreams change, become more coherent. Whoever and wherever Shiro is, Keith can feel a frustration and desperation that seeps cold to the bone. He dreams of old hurts and new anxieties, of a terror that overwhelms again and again. He also dreams of recovery, determination; a defiance in the face of something that feels like it could crush him.

He wonders who Shiro is. The hurt is well-worn, familiar; visceral and all too real.

He stands by his bed, bow dangling from his hand, and wonders if he’ll ever find Shiro one day.

He wonders if the hurt ever leaves.

Shiro sketches over and over and over, pieces of a person with stubbornness like steel under paper and eyes like a galaxy. He dreams of unfinished melodies, of a spectre that looms large and frightening; dreams that he’s chasing something that he never catches up to, that’s always out of reach. It mirrors his own resentments, rooted like trees between his rib bones.

Wherever that boy is, Shiro wants to find him. He wants to reach out and smudge color over high cheekbones. He wants to find a shade of purple that will match the color of Keith’s gaze and its intensity. He wants to sit beside him and tell Keith that he understands the pain all too well. The nagging hollowness, restlessness; the unease that sits static under his bones — it’s also in the music.

He hears it longer now, more vividly. Shiro can hear the desperation in it, the way it trails off, the way some parts don’t fit. He hears the uncertainty in something long-loved and it cuts into him, because he knows what that’s like.

Shiro stares at all the discarded paper around him and digs the heel of his palm into his chest, tries not to let the feeling overwhelm him.

He tries and fails at a lot of things, these days.

Their days come and go. Keith sees more colors; Shiro keeps hearing music. Always, for both of them, there is a little more of each. Keith sometimes hears the scratch of pencil on paper, smells graphite and paint. Shiro hums whole stretches of music while he walks, while he cooks, while he sits and sketches the same person over and over. Sometimes, when Keith is alone in practice rooms, it feels like there’s someone else with him, someone long-loved and familiar and welcome. Sometimes when Shiro lies in bed surrounded by his work, he feels the echo of a helplessness, a weight that sits heavy like lead; in another reality, Keith is curled in a corner of his dorm, crying.

Once, when the frustration is overwhelming — when it threatens to bloom like splinters and ice in his lungs, when it threatens to throttle him — when in his reality, Shiro is seated among piles of discarded paper while his arm hurts and he feels like he’s drowning—

Keith presses palms to the ache in his chest and crumples into himself. He fumbles for his violin, brings it to his shoulder. Then he plays — anything, everything he can think of; plays whatever comes to mind in the fragile hope that the other boy can hear him. He takes the desperation that’s almost suffocating — that’s suffocating Shiro even now — and answers it with music. He thinks _Shiro, Shiro, Shiro,_ and tries to tell him with every melody that _I am here, I can hear you._

In his world, Shiro lifts his head, startled into silence. He can hear that — hear _Keith,_ breathtaking and vivid and _real_. He glances up from where he’s slumped against the far wall of his bedroom, and something quiets in his chest, unspools in his lungs. The music is comforting, and well-loved, and beautiful.

He says, soft, hesitant, grateful: “I can hear you.”

In another world, Keith’s heart feels too big for his chest. He plays on.

.o0o.

They never meet. Their worlds intersect in so small a space, sometimes neither of them can believe it’s real. But Shiro keeps hearing music, keeps drawing more of this boy and his slender fingers, his eyes. Keith feels an ache in his chest and his limbs, sees more and more color in the world around him. They carry that awareness, those feelings inside them as they move forward in their lives, and it’s almost like there’s someone holding their hand and pulling them on. Keith can hear the song he’s looking for, almost there, almost within reach; Shiro draws and redraws on his canvas as he tries to recreate the boy from somewhere not here. He walks with a melody in his head just as Keith plays with color on his skin, and both of them know: there is someone not here, someone who loves me.

(Perhaps it is possible to fall in love with someone not of your reality.)

They never meet, but something happens:

It’s a Thursday afternoon and Shiro is walking home from class, headed for the corner shop where he sometimes buys lunch.

He passes a thrift store, and then

feels like his world has stopped.

Shiro turns to the display windows, eyes wide. A few people brush past him, grumbling, but he neither notices nor cares.

There’s music in there — actual music. And he knows the song that’s playing — he _knows_ it.

He runs into the store, almost stumbling in his haste. The music saturates the room, soft and familiar. Shiro stands there and breathes into empty spaces and feels like he could cry because this, here, is real. This is real.

The girl at the counter tells him she has no idea what it is she’d found, just that it had been tucked between copies of old movies. She’d played it on a whim and then couldn’t stop listening, entranced by the sound of something she’d never heard or known before. Shiro buys the CD without a second thought, clutching it to his chest as he runs home, lunch forgotten.

It’s a little scratched, and has no official label, just a short track list and name: Keith. Shiro loads it into his laptop and hits play, and he knows.

They’ll never meet, but here, in his world, something of Keith exists. 

He’s real; _they’re_ real. Shiro has this song.

The music goes on, filling his tiny apartment. Shiro lies back and closes his eyes. He lets the songs play one after the other, and simply breathes and listens.

(And Shiro wonders, if there are other versions of their story out there; other realities where they do meet, where they find each other and fall in love and build lives with each other. Here, in his world, all Shiro has is a CD and a collection of memories, but they’re enough.

He knows, as he listens: there is love here, and a home.)

He leaves the tracklist on loop, then picks up his pencils, takes out his paints. He sits by his window and works, heedless of when his hand cramps and his shoulders ache. By the next morning, he’s finally finished a whole painting. His hands are smudged with color and his head hurts and he feels like he’s half-drowning, but.

This boy with eyes like a galaxy — he’s real.

Shiro sits on the floor under his bedroom window, slumped back against the paintjob. He shuts his eyes and lets his hands drop to the floor.

In another world, Keith sets his hand down on wood slats, and it is almost, almost like they are beside each other, like their hands could touch.

Later on, while Keith starts playing the melody in his head again, he thinks he hears soft laughter.

Later on, while Shiro puts the finishing touches to the galaxies staining high cheekbones, he thinks he hears a new string of notes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! I hope that wasn't too unwieldy orz 
> 
> Come say hi on Twitter — I'm [@redluxite](https://twitter.com/redluxite), and you can usually find me yelling about Haikyuu, Sheith, BNHA, Promare, and other things ^__^ You can also check there for ways to support my writing!


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